Examining the reading behaviours and performances of sixth-graders for reading instruction: evidence from eye movements

摘要

Previous studies were lack of evidence to show “what” and “how” students read. In addition, they focused on discovering the reading phonomenon among the university students. Solutions were not suggested to help the students. Hence, the main purpose of this study was to employ eyetracking technology to examine the fluent reading behaviours and performances of sixth-graders. Students were expected to perform fluent reading. This study also compared how students with high and low reading abilities use different strategies to understand the texts. Seventy sixth-graders from participated in this study. The average age of all the participants was 11.54 years (SD .98). In this study, three narrative texts were designed purely in English but the keywords of the other three texts were translated into Chinese. All the materials were shown on Tobii X120 non-intrusive eyetracker with 120 Hz sample rate. It was a two-way mixed research: 2 (high vs low reading abilities) x 2 (English texts vs English Texts with translated Chinese texts). A 2 x 2 analysis of variance (ANOVA) was computed to analyse the eye-movement indices. The findings of this study significantly indicated that students with high reading ability performed better in both texts but students with low ability were quite well-perform with the assistance of translated Chinese words. Based on the students’ eyetracking data, reading instruction was suggested to teachers to assist the students with low reading abilities. Citation Soh, O.K. (2016). Examining the reading behaviours and performances of sixth-graders for reading instruction: evidence from eye movements. Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, 12 (4),. Italian e-Learning Association. Keywords Eye Movements Reading.